“Maybe such devotion, in which one holds the world
in the clasp of attention, isn’t the perfect prayer,
but it must be close, for the sorrow, whose name is doubt
is thus subdued, and not through the weaponry of reason,
but of pure submission. Tell me, what else
could beauty be for?”
— Mary Oliver, from her poem “Terns”Even as a boy, on my solitary expeditions through the dark towering pines of deep East Texas, listening as I did so eagerly back then to the soft crunch of the pine needle carpet beneath the soles of my weathered sneakers, I sensed there was more to this world than the grown ups were telling me. The trees shimmered like chiffon curtains in a breeze, hinting at something greater just beyond their gates. The birdsong echoed a distant orchestral magnificence, as if their melodies joined with larger compositions that were already playing, and are always playing, just beyond the human ear. Everywhere I looked, the universe teased a grander reality coyly hiding behind it, like a lover, shyly flirting. The arc of this romance through the years of my life has been precisely as Teilhard described in The Divine Milieu.
“Throughout my life, through my life, the world has little by little caught fire in my sight until, aflame all around me, it has become almost completely luminous from within.” —Teilhard de Chardin
I’ve always believed in these perceptions. I’ve never once doubted their veracity. But I have long struggled with how to integrate them, and my intuitions about them, into a society and a world that does not on the whole perceive them, or accept them as real. It’s akin perhaps to trying to craft an honest path through a world where no one believes in the color blue, or that there is life in the sea, or that there is such a thing as love. Should I shout my truth on the city streets, and make of myself a mad prophet, easily discounted and quickly dismissed? Do I bury what I see, judge it dangerous or useless, and do my best to go to sleep with the rest of the world? Or should I hide what I know as a secret treasure in my heart, and offer it only rarely and with great care to the wandering few, who are, like me, strangers in the land?
I chose the latter way for most of my life. But I see now I can no longer take that path. For more than ever in these days, the world needs what the mystics know. And my hiding was only ever really about fear, anyway.
These past two years in the van have been a long and often tedious exorcism of those fears. This has been unexpected, to be honest, for I have long believed my compulsion to keep the peace to be more of a feature than a fault of my character, and my drive to accommodate the wishes of others, regardless of the quality of those wishes or of the people wishing them, to align me more with nobility than nihilism. That this is ridiculous is now obvious to me, but I am not quick to shame myself for not getting it sooner. The fear of abuse by forces more powerful than me was beat into me early and deep. The reflexive flinch at the first twitch of any upraised hand is a demon not easily exorcised from the soul. Or quickly.
But it has been an exorcism, these past two years, a long and bitter wrestling with the demons of voicelessness and conformity and every shade of fear mongering to which a soul can kneel when lost in the dark on a back road in Maine and the engine light comes on, hundreds of miles from anything civilized, or even human.
The Great Spirit has made the van my crucible, a forge of divine burning, where God’s holy fire consumes the false armor of my fears until at last pieces of it petrify and flake away. So now, for me, the van has become both Eucharist and tomb: a metal box where dead things go and are burned away, and a holy, living Wildness rises from the absence.
It is this Wildness that I love, that is the shimmering in the trees, that is the echo of the orchestra beyond the singing of the birds. It is God, though that is just our word for it, and a battered word at that. Actually, I’ve come to believe that the greater part of this Wildness is beyond the reach of words, and indeed, of nearly any sound at all but silence. The wonder native to it is deeper, broader, and more expansive than language can reach. It is beyond comprehension, like sitting on the shore at the foot of a towering ocean wave perched infinitely high above me, about to crush me, and knowing somehow that this infinite wave is but one wave on an infinite ocean with infinite shores and infinite waves, and infinite depths where I could never survive even for the blink of an eye, and to know somehow this ocean is aware of me, and loves me, and is watching me, captivated for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, and this is why the wave that towers over me does not crash and obliterate me where I sit.
It’s like that. But the comparison is weak.
What I can say of it is this: I am changed in its presence. It deepens me, like a shallow well extended to fresher springs much farther down. I may look the same on the surface, but inside, I feel undone. Renovated, perhaps. No. Recreated. Made again. I still show the same face to the world, but the man behind it is not the same man. Yet, the nature of the change, like everything to do with the Wildness, is nearly all beyond words. I walk around with the Infinite in the palm of my hand, tucked away behind my back because what can I possibly say about it? There are no words. I am rendered mute.
Perhaps I am becoming an echo of the Great Silence. If so, that is no small gift.
Meanwhile, this is what I can say, what I think we all most need to hear: That all things in this universe, including us, are far, far more than matter, and that truth matters more than all the wealth, power, or fame our petty social games have ever conjured for the fleeting satisfaction of a selfish soul’s pride.
There is a Way that leads to life, but it is not what society thinks it is, or wants it to be. It’s not a performance, or a competition. It involves no games of comparison, self-hatred, envy, or shame. It does not traffic in petty gambits to gain status, praise, or power over others. It is free of all compulsions toward grandiosity. It does not scapegoat, nor in pride condemn.
The Way is made for broken things, and only the broken can find it. It is above all things humble. One enters the Way on their knees, or not at all. It is free of pretense. No masks or fig leaves are permitted on the path. Yet, it is not abnegation for its own sake, but rather as a process of sacred consecration—a clearing of the table in preparation for a feast.
“The Way is made for broken things, and only the broken can find it.”
The longings that pull us forward on the Way are as a white-hot fire blazing in the dead of night. They are fierce, relentless, unquenchable, a furnace of desires in the center of one’s true heart—in one sense, ever satisfied in their burning; in another, ever yearning, always seeking more. For all their fury and intensity, what they want is simple. They seek, first and above all else, surrender. Then wholeness. Then death for love’s sake. Then resurrection, and union with love’s true Source. The disappearance of self is the ultimate fulfillment. The burning candle tumbles, laughing, into the heart of the sun.
That sun is Love, and it is what sustains everything. Love is what undergirds the universe. Every humble mystic from every culture and every age from the beginning of time has seen the truth of this. This love is no dreamer’s weak-willed fantasy. It is fierce, and durable; shrewd, and kind. Love is the way things work, and without love, they don’t. What is trying to happen right now in the human world is an awakening from which we can never turn back—an awakening to love as the only strategic response that makes any sense to the many crises we collectively face, and the only sensible path we can follow to have any chance at all, not only of surviving, but of becoming all the mysterious Wildness means us to be.
Not everyone sees this. Not yet. But enough of us do. As Jesus famously said,
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like the yeast a woman used in making bread. Even though she put only a little yeast in three measures of flour, it permeated every part of the dough.” — Matthew 13:33
As yeast is to dough, so love is to the world. It takes only a little, patiently embedded in the thick of the hurt or hate or division or deception to unsettle and upend the entire dark operation. To be such a light in the darkness is uncomfortable to the extreme. But it is necessary. Even though it costs your life.
Because of course it will.
Because that is what love is.
“There comes a time when nothing is meaningful except surrendering to Love.” — Rumi
Wow. So well said.
Beautifully said. And yes, beautifully true.